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[When building a great game development team, how do you keep everyone on track? Game HR veteran Marc Mencher continues his in-progress Gamasutra series, discussing how to meet goals and reward top employees.] Set and Maintain Team StandardsA team is made up of individuals who perform unique tasks, and when combined, produce a finished product that is greater than the sum of its parts. You want team members to do their best and be ready to help others, so you need to promote a sense of cohesion; the team will only succeed if everyone works together. Your team should be able to generate their own tasks, tackle problems, agree on solutions and implement their decisions with confidence. Challenge perceived assumptions to improve team productivity and effectiveness:
Conduct Regular Team ReviewsReview your team's progress regularly to help them define and refine specific aspects. Regular team reviews can be conducted by the entire team or by key team members. Use them to check team performance against team objectives and valid comparisons like the competition. Make sure work methods are on track and be ready to make changes as needed.
Choose Appropriate MeasurementsLife is easier when all of the measurements of your productivity are laid out before you. In the game world, this can be as simple as putting a new game in your Xbox 360 and checking out what the Achievements are. In order to improve your Gamerscore, you will need to complete various tasks throughout the game, but having a look before hand will certainly open your eyes to some things you may want to do to rack up points and impress your friends.
When you're analyzing team performance, use an objective, quantitative measurement system. Outline a system of metric goals that analyze quality, quantity and cost effectiveness. For instance, if a call center team is measured only by the number of calls handled per hour, response quality will probably suffer. Setting a quota of calls per hour, a wait time target, monitoring a percentage of calls and surveying customer satisfaction by making follow-up calls is a more effective way of measuring team performance and treats the team as if they were individuals instead of automated answerbots.
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Without
knowing these objectives beforehand, you could pass up on various encounters
that were all part of the complete game experience. Unfortunately, in the real
world, you don't have the option to pass up on various milestones or skip
steps, so be clear to identify everything that will need to go into the game
from the get-go.
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Comments
I would like to add my 5 cents especially on brainstorming, which is a frequent buzzword not only in our industry.
Brainstorming is only one in plethora of techniques used for creative problem solving. And it is only used in one of the six convergent phases of Creative Problem Solving (CPS) process. It is important to mention that bRAINSTORMING was “invented” by the same person who “invented” the CPS process, a great mind, Alex Osborn. Those who tried CPS process are aware how powerful it may be.
Nowadays we may find cca. 10-15 derivates of the original Brainstorming techniques (nominal, superhero, negative brainstorming,…) which are more efficient then the original one. It is good to be familiar with as much as possible derivates since the fact that original brainstorming works effectively only for a short period of time with the same group of people. Btw Wikipedia offers nice article on what, where, how, who, … on Brainstorming.
Being creative and inventive in our industry is a core competence to most of our employers. In my opinion too much buzz was used for only one technique while neglecting all other important phases as problem (re)definition, exploration, solution planning and execution or other hundreds of techniques used in other phases of CPS.
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